By Edith Orenstein, FEI Financial Reporting Blog - The SEC announced at a press conference earlier today (Aug. 19)- see related SEC press release - that it has "unveiled the successor to the agency’s 1980s-era EDGAR database, which will give investors far faster and easier access to key financial information about public companies and mutual funds. The new system is called IDEA (Interactive Data Electronic Applications).

The SEC notes that the IDEA system, "[b]ased on a completely new architecture being built from the ground up... will at first supplement and then eventually replace the EDGAR system."